Unexpected email - legitimate?

Hello, I'm manager of a rock,metal and punk direction of a chain store system of CD- shops from Saint -Petersburg, RUSSIA Would you send me please your catalogue and the sample of your disc for further business progress.
With best regards ,MICHAIL
My snail mail RUSSIA SANCT-PETERBURG 198020 KURLANDSKA 32-59 ZUBAROWSKY MICHAIL

I'd be asking a LOT of questions, if I were you. Unsolicited e-mails, particularly from overseas, are generally very suspicious. There have been so many reports of Internet fraud, that this sounds like another one to me...too many unanswered questions.

i could be wrong but what keeps him from reproducing your cd and selling it. Do US copyright laws protect your cd there? When i worked for a label we used to send international cds out all the time, usually to mags and stuff so they could review them. I would think youd need to sign some sort of contract for a distro deal though.

My band got onto a Siberian radio station this way. As far as I can tell, that was on the up-and-up. Or, at least, I haven't detected any mass pirating of our very obscure disc abroad. It was cool to claim an international following for a while. I don't see much more risk being pirated from Russia than from North Carolina, really. I'd go for it, just for the sheer heck of it.

Back when I played in a Ska band, I'd get letters and emails like this all the time...South America, Northern Europe, Spain, etc...It's kinda status quo in some tight music scenes in countries that don't have the populations to fuel a large scene...It was mostly just enthusiastic scenesters and harmless fun.

If a bunch of people in a small city (or large for that matter) across the world wanted to dub off a bunch of copies of one of my CD's I'd be OK with it. I mean, it's not a market you'd likely be able to 'exploit' anyway...and you're spreading your music well beyond the geographic boundries that are normally in place.

I was in an industrial band back in the very early 90's, and we were 'big in Belgium' for about a month. Kinda neat.

The company owner here got porked pretty good
by a guy he got friendly with in St. Pete. It's a nasty
part of the world, and the people there make a living any
way they can. Hustles and scams on foreigners are all
part of the scene. I told him so, but he didn't listen
to me. Too bad for him.